Gently Falling
by Asphodelium
Summary: There really is someone out there for everyone, as Mr. Lancer finds out when his new student teacher draws him out of his shell. This is not a sweeping tale of epic romance, but it's theirs, and that's all they need. Lancer/OC, now a two shot.
1. It's Painless

**Author's Note:** I can't even come up with half an explanation for this. Somehow when I need to sleep my brain just supplies me with these ideas. Rated for one or two swearwords but basically just kind of a free flowing fluff thing, the only thing weirder than this is the accompanying art I made for it on my deviantART account.

Comments, thoughts, criticisms, suggestions on how to do better and general thoughts are always appreciated.

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><p>It was noon on a sunny spring Sunday, and Mr. Lancer was walking down the street hand in hand with a gorgeous young woman.<p>

No, really. Not a single part of that sentence was sarcastic, and that scared him. Arabelle had looped her arm through his and laced her fingers through his like it was the most natural thing in the world, like they didn't have a twenty year age gap between them, like they weren't supposed to be strictly professional. As they walked she talked, about _House Of Leaves_ and the wordplay in the story and how you never saw bilingualism used like that anymore. Her dark brown hair caught the sunlight and every so often she would turn from admiring the town to look at him when he replied, her sky blue eyes making it hard to remember to concentrate on the author's use of Latin. Arabelle Martin was his student teacher, a recent graduate who managed to retain the tiniest traces of an accent after four years in the United States, and she was slowly but surely undoing him.

The first change she'd made in his life was getting him to eat right. While past student teachers had maybe brought in coffee or said something to the effect of Hemingway being interesting, she brought him whole meals, sometimes (more often than not) from home and they ate while discussing the ending of The Giver and the ways it could be interpreted and whether or not the movie adaptation of Tuck Everlasting did the book justice. Arabelle diligently stocked the teacher's lounge with bananas, apples, oranges and teas, and sought him out at lunch. She would sit on the windowsill, her warm, dark tan skin soaking up the sun, and instead of running down to the Nasty Burger he would work his way through a sandwich and a piece of fruit. It was so sweet and unrelated to teaching it would've been inappropriate if they ever stopped to address it. She was too busy asking for his opinion of Iago in Othello to remember this was weird.

Arabelle actually worked, really took student teaching seriously, explaining in passionate lengthy run on sentences just how The Necklace was a strong example of timeless literature and how Ghosts Of The Balkans managed to paint every single ethnic group it portrayed in a negative light. She made lesson plans, she highlighted time brackets, she reorganized _his_ desk so that she would know where everything was. Diagrams of character names and relationships were drawn. Lengthy breathless optimistic gushing was done over the works of Bruce Coville. And if you had a cell phone she would snatch it out of your hands and casually toss it into a bucket at the front of the room without looking behind her, ignoring the whining of the popular kids.

"If it bothers you so much, write an essay explaining to me why you need it," she told them cheerfully, and then they'd launch back into their lesson. Her total ease around the students and inability to be intimidated by students in the athletics program earned her no praise from the students but also made her the wide eyed idealist among her fellow teachers, an accusation she wore like a badge of honor.

She was proud to be an idealist. She was proud to be an optimist. And the second biggest change she made in his life was that she made him actually leave the house. There was a performance poetry reading in Ashtown, and Arabelle didn't want to go to such a big event alone. There was a David Sedaris book signing he just had to be there for since the mall it was in had a magnificent book store in it. There was a thrift store with books for fifty cents each and he really should come by and see the amazing titles they had. Every couple of days now, it seemed, he found himself out and about, accompanied by the only person on Earth who cared when he spoke. She hung on his words and challenged his views on the books they read, always willing to interpret even the harshest villain sympathetically, seeing misguided attempts at good where he saw rashness, positing that characters were in love when all he saw was irrational behavior. He met her for coffee repeatedly to have these conversations, and eventually, she somehow wrangled him into going to basketball games with her.

Basketball was Arabelle's thing. Not his. He didn't hate the sport, but he also didn't care about it. The fact that he was there to watch a high school game got him about a dozen double takes per quarter, but while all eyes were on the floor and the rapidly moving players, his kept drifting down to where she had her hand on his knee. Somehow he felt warmer than he should have and he slept easily that night without reading, waking up to the comforting thought that oh yeah, they had a class together today. They ate breakfast sitting together on the couch in the teacher's lounge, their silence companionable, and it was at that exact moment, as Arabelle shyly thanked him for coming with her, that he realized he was in love.

That was terrifying. Because love was something he read about. It was something he critiqued from afar. It wasn't something he engaged in. He wrote volumes on how two characters interacting meant this or that, but he couldn't read the actions of someone real and tangible right in front of him. He knew, though, that he wanted her by his side, that the idea of life without her seemed hollow and empty, that he couldn't go back to sitting around his empty house blocking out the world with fiction. He had tasted true companionship and found it not only sweet but life altering. Before her his years of teaching blended into one another, jocks and geeks with great potential and assignments no one ever really tried hard to complete. His own reading material had started to become dull and meaningless to him until she challenged him to rethink it, to side with other characters, to look at things from a new perspective.

He was scared to reach out to her and lose her when his affections were one sided like they always, always had been. When he was younger and a young Literature major he'd chased after love for four straight years of college, chasing the idea of the person who would finally _understand_. The person who would speak in metaphors and need him like he needed them, the one soul who wouldn't just want to be friends and then gradually lose contact with him. He had desperately wanted that summer rain to come down on him for so long that now, alone in the desert of his own meaningless life, he didn't dare move towards the rain cloud. One wrong move and the pain from her rejection would break him, cut him so deeply he would dive back into apathy and never see the light of day again. He'd been in the dark so long his eyes had adjusted until it was all he could see.

Arabelle leaned her head against his shoulder, smelling faintly of coconut shampoo and something uniquely her own. The incredible thing about reality was how it yanked him out of his own thought. Her touch pulled him out of the dark each time and it was so unprofessional and so unlikely she would ever feel the same way for him he felt for her. Women never did. The few men he'd attempted to woo in college hadn't cared for him either. Love was a reckless roulette he wanted no part of, but the reward if he was right in betting on her was so great he couldn't resist, even if his old heart wanted to. He was old and tired and he just needed something to work out, just once. And just when he had been considering retiring and giving up human contact altogether a short black woman from French Guiana had appeared in his doorway clutching an armful of books.

Everything about this felt like it should be happening even though he knew all the reasons it shouldn't. He knew his already distant and disapproving parents would disown him for getting involved with someone who wasn't white. And she was worth damning himself for, because talking to her was so easy already it was like he'd known her all his life. She was worth all these risks, even the risk of his job, simply because when she smiled the day felt like summer even in winter.

He stopped her where they stood, the trees flowering around them, and tried to find words to express feelings so real any fictional metaphor seemed an insult by comparison to how intense this thing they'd fallen into was. But she reached out and touched his arm, and smiled. They looked at each other. Arabelle's eyes were redeeming, kind, welcoming when he was more vulnerable in the silence than he'd ever been in their endless conversations.

"I..." he started, then trailed off, not knowing how to finish that sentence.

"I know," she replied, voice low and serious, and she stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and embraced him. It was more passionate than any kiss, more meaningful, two bodies pressed together gently and fully, her warmth better than sunshine, his grip on her tight for a moment before he released her so they could look each other in the eyes again, and he knew she understood. They were not living vicariously through the writings of great wordsmiths before them.

They were living ordinary life, together. And that was infinitely more fulfilling.


	2. Letting Your Love Show

**Author's Note:** By request and by the power of my plotbunnies not letting me go no matter what, I hereby present to you the exact same romance, from the perspective of Arabelle Martin. Because apparently, I like writing Mr. Lancer's romance. (I don't get it either, folks.)

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><p>When she was three years old, her father taught her to read.<p>

It was after his hours at the plantation but before her mother got home from cleaning other people's houses. His hands were calloused and rough even after he washed them, and his eyes were always tired, but they lit up at the sight of his daughter, and he had brought home for her a gift, the first thing she would ever remember getting, a book. It was in terrible shape, pages wavery from water exposure and unable to fold back in correctly it was bloated in her small hands. The story, she would later forget. What she remembered was her father telling it to her, turning the jagged letters into sentences somehow and she wanted to know how.

She wanted to know how so he taught her, drew each letter in the dirt, one by one, and she memorized them. She took days to do it, to put together how these things formed a word, but each had a sound. If she put the sounds together they formed familiar words and this clicked soon enough. It was the trap of the French language that many, many letters were silent and she had to decode things, sit there trying to figure out what that sounded like, what that meant, and each word was fought for.

It gave her something to do. She was often left alone even at that age, not out of negligence but because her parents needed to put a roof over her head. They dreamed of sending her to college one day, of her being able to afford a house with lights in it and that kept them going. Sometimes her mother worked long into the night, picking up last second odd jobs and only coming home in the deepest darkness, laying down beside her husband on a tired mattress for only a few hours before it began again. Arabelle was left alone, and though they locked the door to keep her inside, it was about all they could do. The books were the first distraction, though it hadn't been meant as such.

Since she was too young to go to school, she imagined it. She imagined being a teacher and telling people what the letter meant and telling them stories, and, having run out of books from her father by the time she was four, she made up her own. They were rambling and incoherent as all children's tales were, but she had many, and wrote out the made up names of her characters in the dirt. She told her father when he was home and he would pick her up, hefting her into the air and laughing, teeth white like the tiled floors her mother scrubbed. He told her she was clever and amazing and when she said she wanted to be a teacher he told her she would be.

When she was old enough to go to school her parents somehow pulled together money for paper and pencils, and soon it became apparent to everyone that Arabelle was not like the other children. At recess she did not run around and play with the others, though she was invited to. She sat under the tree in the schoolyard, shaded from the burning sun, and read. Teachers were hesitant to loan out books to her at first, but she took good care of them every time. She suggested being inside to read and soon she'd built up a reputation as the one student they could trust not to ruin anything she was handed.

By age eight, she was in class with boys and girls age ten. She more than kept up; even if she had to write on the back of paper she'd already used for an assignment and collect abandoned pencils off the playground and classroom floors, she excelled. Arabelle was serious and devoted, like her mother, with her father's ability to find joy in things. She held her head high when her classmates teased her, smoothed out the hem of her ragged dresses, because she had skipped two years and they barely managed the one they were in. She was worth something, and she knew it. Many people never learned they had worth, but then again, most people didn't have her parents.

Scholarships and grants and applications and a lot of prayer got her into college, where she found a golden opportunity to go to the States. Univesities under scrutiny for their lack of racial diversity would pay part of the expenses and her scholarships would pay the rest. She knew it was a gamble and that if she failed she would be booted back in an instant, she knew her English needed work, but she shut her eyes and remembered that first bloated book, and formed a sudden vision of getting her family to America. She would ave up money and work while a student and then they would live there together off her teacher's salary.

It's one thing to form that plan.

It's another thing that she actually _did it_.

The fare for two people to the States wasn't as much as she'd thought, wasn't as impossible as she'd dreamed, and she was still a student when she brought them to her, but they lived together in her apartment, which was infinitely nicer than anything she'd ever had as a child. She worked as a waitress inbetween classes and her father found construction work, still strong enough to keep going. For the first time in her life Arabelle's mother got to actually relax, something that single handedly saved her failing health. Her blue eyes regained their spark, her bony body filled out a bit, and she got to see her daughter's library of cheap second hand books cluttering the whole apartment. She organized them, talked to Arabelle about them, and saw the joy in her face when she did so.

Eventually the construction work her father got was steady enough they moved into their own apartment, cheaper but their own, bigger than their old house was, room just for them. He did maintanance around the building and soon built up a friendship with the landlord, who promised that he would never throw them to the streets. They made their payments and had money left over, something they'd never imagined possible, and the two were living their own happily ever after as their daughter persued her degree in Education with a double major in Literature, something she pulled off by being just as much a loner as she had always been.

Then she was assigned to be a student teacher. It was the last step to finalizing her dream. But while even her professors grew weary of her babbling about books, this teacher didn't, and that was when she stopped viewing him as a teacher and started viewing him as a friend.

He never rolled her eyes at her, never told her she was overbearing, never seemed irritated when she took over hi breakfast or suggested new books for the cirriculum. He never laughed at her over analyzing things. He joined in. There was a wellspring of words inside him his students didn't listen to, so she listened for them, more involved with the lessons than any of them ever dreamed of being. She threw herself into work, wanting nothing more than to have a life like his, teaching and sharing the joy they found in the works of Hemingway and Guy de Maussupant, and even if they didn't get through to everyone, they got through to some. _They_. She thought of them as a they within a month, which was something her mother picked up on before her, sharing a knowing smile with her father Arabelle missed.

In books romances unfolded rapidly and in moments of passion, they were clear and they were vivid. So Arabelle didn't realize she'd fallen in love with him until suddenly she couldn't imagine doing anything without him. Her invitations to him were like a floodwave, please go with to this, let's do that, have you seen this, we should try to form a book club, any idea that popped into her head being voiced because he would always hear her out. They belonged by each other's side, arguing over the romantic subtext in The Moorchild while other couples went to the movies. God help them when they did see a movie together. They spent two hours afterwards at her place picking it apart trope by cliche by reference, slowly working their way through dinner that was more backdrop than food.

He understood. He understood the overwhelming number of thoughts, the need to express, to read, to live through others, to see the hidden meanings in a story like light catching glass and turning it another color. Even her own parents couldn't understand how desperately passionate she got over things they dismissed as just stories. The only person who ever understood was a bald American man with a goatee who lived a life just as solitary as hers was, and taking his hand didn't induce the cliche butterflies or dramatic blush she'd been told true love would bring. Taking his hand felt right. Her head belonged on his shoulder. Her gaze fell naturally to his forest green eyes. There was no romantic tension, because there was no reason to be tense around the one person who truly knew her.

She pulled him close, or maybe he pulled her close, it didn't matter. That she was half his age didn't matter. That his skin was pale peach against her brown was irrelevant. This was where she should be, and this was what she wanted. And he wanted it too, so no confessions or teary eyes were needed. They just admitted to themselves something the rest of the world had seen coming a mile off. They didn't even need to utter the three damning and solidifying words "I love you". They had said it in subtext every morning they spent together grading papers and every night they spent on the phone debating the use of metaphor in Novala Takemoto's work.

He didn't sweep her off her feet. He simply fit perfectly into her life, a piece of the puzzle she hadn't known was missing, completing it without even knowing he was doing so.

And that was so much better than anything in any book.


End file.
